FarmShare 1 consists of the corn, barley, and rye servers. Those servers are old, and are running an older Ubuntu (Ubuntu 14) which is going to be losing support in a year or so. So, we are going to be retiring the corn, barley, and rye servers on December 20. Attempts to log in will present you with a message telling you about the retirement, and inviting you to log in to rice.stanford.edu.
FarmShare 2 is the new FarmShare environment, running Ubuntu 16. The login nodes are available at rice.stanford.edu. Much of the software from FarmShare 1 is already available on FarmShare 2, and users also have the ability to build their own software, and to install software locally (for example, via linuxbrew). If there is software missing that your entire group would use, please let us know!
Although AFS will still be available on rice, your home directory on FarmShare 2 is not your AFS home directory, but your AFS home directory will still be available. AFS is not available at all on the compute servers, because of problems users had with long-running jobs (which would die as soon as their Kerberos credentials expired).
For the compute servers, we have moved to using a proper job-scheduling system for FarmShare 2. The system, known as "SLURM", is already in use in our large Sherlock compute environment, as well as other smaller compute environments.
People will have to transition to FarmShare 2, which is why we are looking for your help: We need you to talk to your co-workers; and to the faculty, staff, and students who you support; letting them know about FarmShare 1's retirement, and asking them to check out FarmShare 2.
The place to go for FarmShare 2 information is https://farmshare.stanford.edu. On that site, you can find our announce mailing list (farmshare-announce@lists.stanford.edu) and our discuss list (farmshare-discuss@lists.stanford.edu). We (Research Computing) also have office hours for in-person FarmShare support during the academic quarter. It is outside of ICME (in the Huang Basement) on Wednesdays from 10 AM to 12 PM, so stop by on your way to lunch! Finally, you can email us directly at srcc-support@stanford.edu.
